CAN A MAN OWN A HOUSE?--WE SING FOR OUR HOSTS OF PULTIT--DAWN AND A
MEETING ON THE TRAIL--THE VILLAGE OF THETHIS WELCOMES GUESTS--LIFE OR
DEATH FOR PEROLLI.
But my delight in this discovery of their intelligence received a
violent blow almost at once, for another man--tall, keen featured,
black bearded, his face framed in the folds of a white turban, red
and blue stones gleaming dully in the links of the silver chains on
his breast; I will never forget him--leaned forward in the firelight
and said: “Such things can never be. Even a child knows that it would
be foolish to own a house in which he did not live. Of what use is a
house, except to live in? As it is, each man has the house in which he
lives, and there are houses for all, and they belong to the tribe that
built them. It is impossible that a man can own a house. It is not the
nature of men to own houses, and we will never do it, for the nature
of man is always the same. It is the same to-day as it was before the
Romans came, and it will always be the same. And no man will ever own a
house.”
“Glory to your lips!” they said to him. “It is so.”
The woman, who had been sitting quietly listening to this, now rose and
very quietly, without saying farewell, slipped out of the firelight,
and in a moment, by the sound of the closing door, I knew she had left
the house. But there was something about my last glimpse of her back
that makes me believe she is still clamoring for her house, and will be
until long after her baby sons are grown and married. Unless she gets
it sooner.
There was a little silence after the woman had gone, and then one of
the youths, compressing his ears with his thumbs, began to sing. He
sang softly, for an Albanian mountaineer, but the high, clear notes
filled the house like those of a bugle. He uttered a phrase and paused;
Cheremi repeated it and paused; and, so singing alternately, repeating
always the same musical phrase with changing words, they chanted long
songs of war and adventure, old legends of men whose lives had been
worn into myths by the erosion of centuries.
The music, strange and nostalgic, seemed to follow a scale quite
different from ours, a simple scale of five notes, thin and vibrating
like a violin string.
“Sing one of the songs of your land, Flower,” said Cheremi to me,
politely. All the Albanians addressed us by our first names, as is the
custom, for among them the last name is merely the possessive form of
the father’s, and it is dropped in conversation. Long since my name had
been translated into their tongue, becoming Drana Rugi-gnusht, Flower
of the Narrow Road.
And we gave them our best. We sang “Juanita,” and “My Old Kentucky
Home” and “Marching Through Georgia” and “Dixie” and “Columbia.”
We stood up and filled our lungs and sang with all our might, but
the result was thin and faint; even to our own ears our songs were
difficult to hear, after the ringing voices of the Albanians.
“Glory to your lips,” they said, courteously, trying to cover their
disappointment and lack of interest. Then we tried “A Hot Time in
the Old Town To-night,” and that fell flat. But from depths of her
memory Frances resurrected an old American popular song; its name I
never knew, I had never heard it before; it had something to do with
an obviously improper conversation over a telephone, ending, “Are you
wise, honey eyes? Good-by!”
That got them! They sat up, very much interested. “We know that song,
too!” said they, and, putting their thumbs to their ears, they sang it
in voices that compared with ours as a factory whistle to a penny one.
Except that in their mouths it became a beautiful thing, vibrant with
innumerable grace notes, and striking truly where our version became
banal. Changed, but it was our melody as unmistakably as a beautiful
woman is the mother of her ugly daughter. “But that is not a true
mountain song, it is a song of the cities,” they said, and we wondered
whether it had come to us through Vienna or gone from us to them
through Paris.
“Try them on the ‘Merry Widow,’” I said, knowing that that music had
come to us from the Balkans, and they laughed aloud at the strains
of that famous waltz. “Albanian gypsy music,” said they, and from
somewhere in the shadows they produced a sort of musical instrument,
cunningly carved from pine, in shape like a long, thin mandolin, strung
with horse hair, and on this with a hair-strung bow they played us the
real “Merry Widow” waltz. “You have gypsies in your country, too,” said
they, and we thought how the centuries have transformed the wandering
bands of ragged entertainers into our press-agented musical-comedy
companies; how the commercial age had divided fortune telling,
thieving, and music into complex and separate activities.
At eleven o’clock Cheremi broke reluctantly from the merry group and,
approaching us stealthily, whispered his request to be permitted to go
home for the night. His house lay only four hours away, perhaps forty
miles by our measurements; he had not seen his family for two years,
and he wished to visit them. He would be back before dawn. We gave him
permission, and one of the villagers went with him, to guard him from
the village dogs.
Then we learned that when darkness came the dogs were let loose, and
after their loosening only the boldest ventured outside stone walls.
And the long wolf howl that rose and quavered and sank and rose again
along the trail that Cheremi followed made the dangers of the night
vocal for us. We had seen the dogs, tied by the houses, curled into
sullen gray-white balls; they are wolves, they are the first dogs,
torn from the forests and made half-tame savage companions of these
primitive men. Here in the Albanian mountains the long process of
molding life, by which men have created the breeds of dogs we know, the
great Dane, the collie, the monstrous, fantastic bulldog, and the wispy
Pekingese is still in its beginning.
For us, safe in the shelter of solid walls, the night wore away as the
previous one had done. Talk and music and the desperate struggle with
weariness; the leisurely dinner in the small hours of the morning; the
brief lapse into unconsciousness, lying on the floor, which we shared
with twenty others--our host and his wife and their smallest child, the
last quite naked, had ascended the notched log to the nest of woven
willow branches that hung above us on the wall--and the awakening at
dawn to the smell of new-made coffee.
“Perolli,” said Frances, desperately, “I simply can’t walk another
twenty miles on one little cup of coffee. Isn’t there something left
over from dinner? Can’t I have just one little bite of corn bread? Oh,
Perolli, please!”
“If we stay for that, it means we’ll never start,” said I. “Slowly,
slowly, little by little, breakfast will be ready at six this
afternoon.”
“But I’m starving!” she wailed.
To Alex and me the cool, sweet morning outside the smoke-filled dark
house called more irresistibly than any thought of food. So at six
o’clock, accompanied by the gay Cheremi, who had just returned, she
and I set out on the twenty-mile walk to Thethis,[3] leaving Perolli
explaining that Frances was of a different American tribe, a tribe
whose custom was to eat in the mornings.
It was not rain; the sky was like one enormous waterspout. When we came
out of the smoky, reeking darkness of the cavelike house it was like
plunging into a waterfall. We gasped with the shock of it; water poured
down our faces, and in an instant there was not a dry inch of skin on
our bodies. But we had been some days in these mountains, walking in
the rain, and after the first chill impact our blood rebounded; we
were warm, and, clutching streaming staffs in dripping hands, Alex and
I followed Cheremi gayly enough. Though when we were separated for
a few feet on the trail the figures of the others became blurry and
indistinct, like figures seen through ground glass.
We went first down the bed of a small stream that ran steeply from
the mountains above to the Lumi Shala below. The water was about a
foot deep, but as soon as we got used to the force of the current we
went very well. Whenever we came to a sheer drop of three or four feet
Cheremi braced himself and swung us lightly down. So we progressed for
perhaps a third of a mile, tingling with the exertion. Then we came out
on the narrow gravelly banks of the Lumi Shala, and were joined by a
strange Albanian, nude to the waist, who was out for a morning stroll.
The proper thing was to offer him cigarettes, but how could one do it
beneath that pour of water? However, the difficulty soon solved itself,
for we found a bowlder as large as a house, with a natural corridor
running through it, and, though its walls dripped and our feet sank to
the ankles in little wells, we managed here to produce and light our
damp cigarettes.
The little cave was filled with a curious greenish light, like that
beneath the sea; at either end of it a gray wall of falling water shut
off our view. Dimly we saw through it a vague blur of tawny gravel, and
nothing more.
The strange Albanian conveyed to us with effort, in broken Serbian,
Italian, German, and Albanian, that this weather was bad for the
health, because when it rained the water in the streams was not good,
and drinking it caused pains in the lungs.
“Good Heavens!” said we. “Pneumonia!”
Then we went out of the cave, and Cheremi and the stranger carried us
across the waist-deep Lumi Shala on their backs, balanced precariously
on their shoulders, surrounded by what seemed an infinity of rushing
water, milky greenish in color and seeming to snap up at us with
millions of white teeth as the violent raindrops struck upon it.
After that, it was only fifteen miles up the beds of streams, across
damp expanses of green and crimson and gray-blue shale, and along
narrow ledges suspended between two vaguenesses of gray, until we came
to the village of Thethis, on the headwaters of the Lumi Shala.
We came to it suddenly, a high-lifted sweep of rock, like the prow of
a gigantic ship wedged between the sides of the narrowing valley. It
towered a thousand feet above our heads, and on either side of it a
white waterfall plunged from the sky and roared into gray depths below.
We followed the side of a narrowing chasm, climbing back and forth
like ants on the side of the cliff, making for the top of one of those
waterfalls. We reached it and, standing in a welter of spray on a tiny
rock ledge, we hung over that battle of roaring water and granite
cliffs to admire the workmanship of the three-foot wall of stone that
held up the trail. The Albanian who was with us had made it, and he was
very proud of it. He might well be.
Then the trail turned the shoulder of the cliff, climbed up a gorge so
narrow that the two-foot stream covered its bottom, turned again and
came out on a little plateau. There was a wide stream running across
the flat space; its water was milky green with melted limestone, and
it was strewn with large, smooth, round bowlders. Some of the bowlders
were pure white marble, others were bright rose pink, others were black
as ebony, and one great one was green as jade.
A bridge of two logs, with railing of twisted branches, ran from
bowlder to bowlder across this incredible river, and we stood on it,
gazing at these colors and at a cliff that rose before us, striped
rose and green and gray and white in long jagged lines, as though it
had been painted, when we heard overhead an outburst of cries, like a
hundred sea gulls shrieking in a storm. We looked higher, and there on
the top of the cliff we saw a score of boys, naked except for bright
loin cloths, engaged in acrobatics.
They made pyramids of their wet white bodies; four, three, two, one,
they stood on one another’s shoulders, and the four who upheld the
pyramid ran swiftly along the edge of the cliff, passing and circling
about a similar pyramid; from top to top of the pyramids the top youths
swung, passing each other in the air, landing on other shoulders,
balancing, taking flight again. The pyramids melted, as though
dissolved in the rain, and formed again, while all along the edge of
the precipice other boys made a frieze of living bodies, turning cart
wheels, somersaulting over one another, walking on their hands.
We stood paralyzed. What did it mean? Then there was an explosion of
shots; the cliffs around us crackled like giant firecrackers, the
air seemed to fall in fragments around us, and through the din came
multiplied shouts. Four tall chiefs appeared on the cliff trail,
gorgeous in black and white and red and blue and green and silver. We
were being welcomed to Thethis.
The shouts redoubled, rifles cracked from every rock, the church bell
wildly rung, and through the clamor, deafened and a little dizzy, we
came into the village of Thethis. The four chiefs, having greeted
us (“Long life to you! Glory to your feet! Glory to the trails that
brought you!” they said) preceded us up the last breathless quarter of
a mile of trail, and all along the way the boys turned handsprings on
the cliff tops.
The village of Thethis is built on the plateau that tops the gigantic,
shiplike rock wedged in the narrow head of Shala Valley. All around it
rise the mountains, snow capped, seamed with white waterfalls like rich
quartz with streaks of silver; the shadows of them lie almost all day
long across the village. Thethis itself is perhaps thirty large, oblong
stone houses scattered at wide intervals on the flat land, and all the
land is divided neatly into squares by stone fences--some fields for
corn, some for grain, some for meadow. In the midst stands the church,
two stories, oblong and gray like the houses, and a network of trodden
paths leads to it.
It seemed a quiet, peaceful place. But on the mountains above it to
the north the Serbian armies lay; their mountain-trained eyes were
doubtless watching us as we crossed the sodden fields. This is the
village, these are the chiefs, whose houses were destroyed by a company
of soldiers sent from the struggling Albanian government in Tirana.
The Serbs held the Albanian cities where the men of Thethis have
always gone to market; the grazing lands where they have always fed
their sheep lie in the grasp of Serbian armies. Scutari, the nearest
free Albanian market place, is a hundred miles away across two mountain
ranges. Therefore it was said that Thethis was friendly to the Serbs;
it was said that her men still went to market in the Albanian cities
that are now clutched by Serbia, that spies came and went across the
border, that the chiefs listened to the clink of Serbian gold. And Alex
and I remembered that in Thethis we were not to address Rrok Perolli,
secretary of the Albanian Minister of the Interior, by his real name.
[Illustration: THE PLATEAU OF THETHIS In the foreground the church,
etc. The hills in the background are held by the Serbs.]
But he was behind us on the trail, doubtless still engaged in trying
to get breakfast for Frances in the house we had left, and we went
forward with easy minds to meet Padre Marjan. He came barefooted and
bareheaded across the fields to welcome us, a thin, ascetic-looking man
in the brown robes of the Franciscan friar. Large brown eyes burned in
his face that seemed made of bones and stretched skin, the grasp of his
thin hand was hot and nervous. He spoke to us in Albanian, Italian,
and German, ushering us with apologies into the bleak rooms above the
church.
The Serbians and Montenegrins, in their drive down toward Scutari, had
looted the church, he said. He had come into Thethis two months ago,
and found not even a wooden stool left. He was doing his best, but it
took time----
The rickety broken stairway led upward to a long hall; from this, a
door let us into the living room. It was bare; rain-stained wooden
walls and a floor that clattered beneath our feet. The one window was
shattered; fragments of glass held together by pasted paper. There were
a long wooden table and a bench, nothing more. No fire. Our soaked
garments were suddenly cold on us, and a chill entered our very bones.
The only fire in the house, he said, was in the kitchen. We begged him
to take us to it, and in a moment we were sitting on a bench before a
crackling fire in a big stone fireplace. The tiny room was crowded with
villagers, the floor was muddy with their trampling, and more arrived
every moment. Padre Marjan had no servant, but all were eager to help
him. Some took off our shoes, others heated water over the fire, a
handsome youth who looked Serbian and talked German anxiously beat eggs
and sugar together while Padre Marjan made coffee. The warmth and the
genuine welcome they all gave thawed us and made us happy, and we sat
drinking the heartening mixture of eggs and coffee, while clouds of
steam rose from us all and a babble of talk went on.
One tall, handsome chief--Lulash, his name was, and beyond doubt he
was the handsomest man we had yet seen--brought us a lamb as a gift.
Dripping beside him stood a ragged boy, barefooted and blue with
chill, who had come down the valley to bring us three eggs, which he
carried tied around his waist in a pouch of goat’s skin. He put them
carefully into our hands, and we tried to return the gift with some
pieces of hoarded candy. But he gazed in dismay at the strange things,
and nothing would persuade him to taste them. A colored handkerchief,
however, was accepted in an ecstasy that made him dumb; he could only
lay it upon his heart and touch our hands to his forehead. Another
chief came with a fat hen, others with eggs; all were eager to roll
cigarettes for us, all were smiling, and in a hundred beautiful phrases
they overwhelmed us with thanks for our coming, for our presence, for
the school that Alex and Frances had promised Thethis. For this was
to be the first of the mountain schools, and Alex, who had come into
the mountains to decide where to put the other two, was delighted to
learn that already, before the school building was begun, Padre Marjan
had started the school, and Lulash had promised a hundred trees to be
burned to make lime for the building.
We sat talking of these things while Padre Marjan set pots of soup to
boiling in the fireplace, broke eggs, unlocked his box of precious
flour, busied himself with all preparations for dinner, climbing over
and around the tangle of lounging bodies, until another outbreak of
echoing noises announced the arrival of Frances and Perolli and Rexh
and our men with the packs. We felt a little tension with Perolli’s
arrival, seeing the keen eyes of the men fixed on his English clothes
and swarthy, intelligent face. He is as tall as most Europeans, but he
was small among those giants, and the neat leather-holstered revolver
and dagger that hung from his belt looked inadequate among all those
long, bristling rifles.
But Padre Marjan, unaware of our apprehensions, was altogether the
happy welcoming host. He greeted the dripping Frances warmly, anxious
only to make her comfortable--she who was also responsible for the hope
of a school in Thethis. He welcomed Perolli also, calling him by his
first name. “How does he know that Perolli’s name is Rrok?” we girls
asked one another with startled eyes--and then, turning to the chiefs
with a radiant smile, “This guest,” said Padre Marjan, with pleasure,
“is Rrok Perolli, the secretary of the Minister of the Interior in
Tirana.”
You read of such things calmly. Nothing that one reads is real to
him. Therefore you can never know what Padre Marjan’s innocent words
meant to us as he spoke them in his crowded kitchen in Thethis, at the
headwaters of the Lumi Shala, a hundred miles and twenty centuries from
anything you know.
The wildness, the savagery and isolation of those mountains seemed to
come into the room. A hundred miles to Scutari, a hundred miles of
almost impassable mountains between us and any kind of help. There we
were, three girls and a boy, alone in the narrow valley beneath the
eyes of the Serbs, the Serbs who six months earlier had caught Perolli
and condemned him to death.
A chill wind seemed to blow through the room; it was not imagined.
Every wide, friendly eye about us had narrowed, every lip tightened a
trifle. A thousand currents of antagonism, of distrust, of intrigue,
seemed like tangible things in the air; only Padre Marjan remained
warm, innocent and smiling.
None of us four, certainly not Perolli, doubted that we had just heard
his death sentence spoken. And I felt again the depths below depths in
the Albanian mind, in that primitive mind which is so much more complex
than ours, as I saw him smile, easily and naturally, and heard him
saying, “Long may you live!” to the circle of his enemies.
“And to you long life!” said they, while he offered them cigarettes and
they rolled others in exchange. He sat down easily on the bench before
the fire; with an unconsidered simultaneous movement we three girls
moved forward and sat beside him; the chiefs again took their places
on the floor, foremost of a mass of bodies and faces, and Padre Marjan
moved in and out and around us all, stirring and seasoning the contents
of the pots that bubbled in the fireplace.
“Talk to them, say something!” said Perolli, in a careless tone,
offering me a cigarette.
“Thank you,” said I, in Albanian, taking it. “Tell them that I come
from California, the most beautiful part of America, and that I have
seen the American mountains and the mountains of Switzerland, both
famous around the world, and that I have never seen such beautiful
mountains as those of the Land of the Eagle. (They will not do anything
while we are here, will they?)”
Perolli translated. “They say: ‘Glory to your lips. Do you live among
the American mountains?’ (No, not unless they get me alone.)”
“In America we cannot live among such mountains. We cannot climb such
trails; we are not strong, like the Albanians. When we go any distance
we ride, and we have forgotten how to walk up cliffs. We have rich,
soft houses, and we travel everywhere on soft cushions, and all our
life is easy. But old men still remember when our life was hard and
rugged, as it is here, and I have seen in America houses of stone, like
these, with very small windows and pegs on the walls where rifles were
hung. For our fathers’ fathers lived hard lives surrounded by enemies,
as the Albanians do now, and some old men still remember those days.
(Do you want me to keep them talking?)”
“They say: ‘What has made the change? Have you cut down your
mountains?’ (Yes. I want a little while to think.)” And he leaned back
and crossed his knees and lighted another cigarette.
“Well, America was very much like Albania in many ways,” said I. “We
were ruled by another nation, as the Albanians were, and we revolted,
like the Albanians. Then our tribes fought, as these tribes fight,
among themselves. And life was very hard. But we had a young government
of our own, as the Albanians have, and it grew stronger, and after
a while all the tribes stopped fighting. Then when they were not
fighting they used all their strength to make life easy, and it became
very easy, and all the houses had windows, because there were no more
enemies to shoot through them, and we made great wide trails that were
easy to travel, and we made and carried all kinds of goods on them, and
became very rich, just as Albania will do.”
“And schools,” said Alex. “Don’t forget the schools.”
Perolli translated at length. When he had finished, Lulash rose, and he
was very splendid in his six feet of height, a snowy turban with folds
beneath the chin outlining his strong, sensitive, sun-browned face,
silver chains clinking against the jewel-studded silver pistols in his
orange-and-red sash, and he made a beautiful speech, graceful with a
hundred flowery metaphors, thanking us and, beyond us, America, in the
name of his village, his tribe, and all his people, for the school and
the hope it brought.
“I,” he said, “am a great chief; I have a great house and large flocks
and much silver, and all that I have I would give if I could read. I
am a chief of Thethis, and my people look to me, and many things are
happening outside our mountains that mean much to my people, and I
cannot learn what they are and what they mean, because I cannot read.
Every night I come to Padre Marjan and study the little black marks,
and long afterward I lie awake in my house and am shamed before myself
for the ignorance of my whole life. But you have brought learning into
my village; our children will know more than we. Our hope is in the
children; they will be little torches leading us out of the darkness.
You have lighted these torches, and I say to you, for Thethis, for
Shala, and for the Land of the Eagle, our hearts are yours to walk
upon. Long may you live!”
“Go on a smooth trail,” said we, as he went out, all the other men
following him. Then, released from their observant eyes, we looked at
one another with all the panic we felt.
“What will they do? Did he mean what he said? Can we expect any
protection from him for you, if we ask it?” said Frances.
“_Qui sait?_” said Perolli. “We Albanians use many words. They have
gone to hold a council. All their immediate interests lie with the
Serbs. If they hand me over--well, you know the Serbian armies hold
their markets and their grazing lands, and a million Albanians are in
Serbia’s power. We have nothing like that to offer these chiefs from
Tirana, yet.”
“But we are guests! But we are women!” we exclaimed.
“Oh, they won’t act quickly. But the trails are long, in the mountains.
Let me think,” said Perolli. And we were silent, watching Padre Marjan
busy and anxious about the cooking.
The hours went by, with a steadily increasing tension on the nerves.
It is so rarely that we are actually in the center of a situation
involving murder that we do not easily adjust ourselves to it. With
Perolli it was different; he did not disguise a very earnest desire to
save his life, but he is Albanian. He laughed, quite as usual; he sat
on the bench before the fire and told stories, and sang Albanian songs,
and joked with Padre Marjan. Only occasionally the thoughts beneath the
surface of his mind rose and engulfed him in a dark silence. At dinner
he ate with good appetite. As for us, watching him, we could not avoid
the horrid idea of the good breakfasts served before executions.
We ate in the bare, bleak living room. It was intensely cold; we wore
sweaters and coats. Rain blew through the broken window upon us. We
would infinitely have preferred to be squatting by the fire in a native
house, but Padre Marjan’s hospitable pride would have been stabbed if
we had suggested eating in the kitchen. So we sat on the bench, with
the table before us, and both of them seemed very strange, and knives
and forks and plates appeared to us the most absurd of hindrances to
the simple and pleasant action of eating. Why, we said, did we ever
invent them; they are not really beautiful or useful; they simply
clutter up our lives; and we were aghast, thinking of all the factories
and railroad cars and stores and dishpans and the millions of hours of
washing up, all of it, one might say, an enormous river of human energy
running into the waste of heaps of broken crockery, and nothing more.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Pronounced as Thaythee--th as in truth.